Matt Matravers

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holding Psychopaths ResponsibleMatt Matravers (bio)Keywordspsychopathy, responsibility, meta-ethics, blameILevy's interesting paper seeks to resolve the issue of the psychopath's moral responsibility in a way that avoids traditional meta-ethical debates. In what follows, I take issue both with the substantive arguments he offers about the responsibility of psychopaths and with whether those arguments can be completed while avoiding meta-ethics.I shall take it for granted that psychopathy is a genuine phenomenon and that it is of the kind described by Levy. Moreover, I am sympathetic to Levy's claim that addressing the moral responsibility of psychopaths is not best done by starting with meta-ethical debates about the capacities relevant to moral responsibility in general. However, because I think that these debates come back to haunt Levy's arguments, it is worth saying a little more about the role meta-ethical considerations have had in discussions of psychopathy.The core question is this: "Are psychopaths properly held morally responsible?" It seems an obvious way to go about answering this question either to ask what capacities are needed for moral responsibility and then check whether psychopaths possess them, or to ask what capacities psychopaths possess (or lack) and then check the relevance of those capacities to moral responsibility. Either way, the method juxtaposes a list of the capacities needed for moral responsibility and a list of the capacities possessed (or lacked) by psychopaths and then simply asks whether the lists match in relevant respects.Although it seems that this must be the right approach, it has a serious flaw, which is that there is no agreement—and little prospect of agreement—among moral philosophers on what capacities are critical for moral responsibility. Kantian political philosophers connect morality with a certain kind of practical reasoning and thus think that whether psychopaths are morally responsible will turn on whether they possess some purely intellectual incapacity. Humeans, by contrast, relate morality to emotional responses and thus think the critical issue is whether psychopaths possess a capacity for "sympathy." Finally, Aristotelians think that a proper grasp of morality requires a combination of intellectual and emotional capacities.As Levy remarks, "we cannot settle a disputed question [the moral responsibility of psychopaths] by invoking principles [in this case meta-ethical principles] that are even more controversial than the original question" (2007, p. 130). That is right. Levy's response is to try to settle the 'original question' without recourse to controversial meta-ethical issues. For obvious reasons, it would be a neat trick if it could be done. For reasons given below, I do not think that it can.Levy's paper relies on a number of arguments. Two are of particular importance: First, that what [End Page 139] characterizes psychopathy is an inability to distinguish moral from conventional transgressions such that "all offences are merely conventional" (2007, p. 132); and, second, that psychopaths are not responsible for becoming psychopathic (they have a causal history of a certain kind).IIThe first of these arguments is presented around interesting empirical findings that do, indeed, suggest that psychopaths think of all transgressions as breaking conventional rules and that they do not appreciate the distinction between such transgressions and those that are, we might say, mala in se, or moral rather than conventional. Levy moves extremely quickly in concluding from this that the moral responsibility of psychopaths is significantly reduced. The argument is as follows: (i) "psychopaths … take harm to others to be wrong only because such harms are against the rules." (ii) "But, the kind and degree of wrongness, and therefore blame, which attaches to infringements of … rules is very different, and usually much less significant, than the kind and degree attaching to moral wrongs." From these two premises, Levy concludes (iii) "their degree of responsibility is smaller, arguably much smaller, than it would be for a comparable harm committed by a normal agent" (2007, p. 132).As an aside, it is not obvious whether the distinction between moral and conventional rules is, in itself, of any great significance. Rather, moral rules generally cover more serious wrongs (malicious wounding is a more serious wrong than insulting one's aunt's...

Antony Duff has argued that an important precondition of criminal liability is that the state has the moral standing to call the offender to account. Conditions of severe social injustice, if allowed or perpetuated by the state, can undermine this standing. Duff’s argument appeals to the ordinary idea that a person’s own behaviour can sometimes negate his standing to call others to account. It is argued that this is an important issue, but that the analogy with individual standing is problematic. Moreover, Duff’s account of standing needs to address two interconnected issues: first, when and in what way the state can lose its standing to call offenders to account, and second, over what range of offences. Key Words: criminal liability • Duff • punishment • social injustice.

This collection brings together essays which reflect on the detailed arguments of "What We Owe to Each Other", and which comment critically both on Scanlon's contractualism and his revised understandings of motivation and morality. The essays illustrate the uses of Scanlon's contractualism by applying it to moral and political problems and in so doing they provide an assessment of the ability of Scanlon's contractualism by applying it to other forms of ethical theory. So, the central questions are: "What is the best interpretation of the theory advanced in "'What We Owe to Each Other?'"; "How does the theory, so interpreted, stand up to criticism?"; and "How does contractualism handle certain difficult problems in politics and ethics?". To answer these questions, the collection includes the work of distinguished political philosophers. The resulting volume will make an important and original contribution to the literature on Scanlon, on contractualism and on contemporary political philosophy.

Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality is an important book. One of its contributions to the discipline is a characteristically clear presentation of what follows if one accepts a commitment to equality, and the reasonableness of continuing and profound disagreements about the nature of the good life. I take the argument of Justice as Impartiality to be an important next step in the attempt to give an account of the content of justice which is impartial, fair, or neutral between conceptions of the good, and engaging with it has the great advantage that many of the criticisms that can be made of Barry apply to other liberal contractualist theories of social justice. It is faintly ironic that it is one of Barry's great virtues, his clarity, that makes it easier to see the problems inherent in the attempt to complete the impartialist project. I have not attempted below to offer a systematic summary and critique of Barry's book or any particular section of it. Instead I have opted to try to engage with the ideas that drive it at a more fundamental level

This paper is concerned with the tensions that arise when one juxtaposes one important liberal understanding of the nature and use of state power in circumstances of pluralism and (broadly) retributive accounts of punishment. The argument is that there are aspects of the liberal theory that seem to be in tension with aspects of retributive punishment, and that these tensions are difficult to avoid because of the attractiveness of precisely those features of each account. However, a proper understanding of both liberalism and retributive punishment allows us to dissolve some of the tensions whilst also bringing each position into sharper relief. The paper begins by introducing the liberal position and outlining the apparent tensions that may arise with retributive punishment. In so doing, there is also a brief discussion of how this debate relates to the more familiar dispute between legal moralists and their opponents. The paper then proceeds by considering each of the areas of tension in turn

In this essay I agrue that contemporary Anglo-American liberal egalitarianism has at its heart a tension: the goal is to find principles of justice that are fair in respecting the distinction between choice and chance and that do not invoke controversial metaphysical arguments. This is a tension because distinguishing between choice and chance itself requires invoking controversial metaphysical arguments. I proceed by offering, and then examining, the thought that Scanlon's distinction between ?attributive? and ?substantive? responsibility offers a route out of the tension described above. The greater part of the essay is taken up with examining Scanlon's account of responsibility and the distinction between substantive and attributive responsibility. My conclusion is that Scanlon does not offer a compelling account of substantive compatibilism; that his theory does not, therefore, release the liberal egalitarian from the tension; but that this does not show that the direction indicated by Scanlon's theory is the wrong one

Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch’s Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Simester and von Hirsch 2011) is an important contribution to the philosophical debate over the nature and ethical limits of criminalisation. As they note in their reply in this symposium, one of the novel aspects of their account is that they do not advance one “unified, grand theory”. Rather, they analyse each ground of criminal prohibition—wrongfulness, harm-based, offense, and paternalistic prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm—so as to develop guiding principles for their use (or, in the case of paternalism, the absence of an independent principle that would underwrite its use).The result is a rich set of arguments that advance a number of debates across the field of criminalisation.However, that is not all: the participants share the view that, as Tatjana Hörnle puts it, “any theory of criminalization presupposes assumptions about the functions of the criminal law. The q

Michelle Madden Dempsey’s Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis (2009) is an important book for many reasons. Amongst these are the prevalence of domestic violence and the extraordinary, largely unaccountable discretionary powers wielded by prosecutors in the United States. Against this background, Dempsey asks in particular what prosecutors should do when the victims of domestic violence withdraw their support from the proposed prosecution. In Prosecuting Domestic Violence, Dempsey provides a general account of prosecutorial practical reasoning that can be applied to answer this question. Given that she argues that “particularly aggressive prosecution” is in at least some cases justified, the later chapters of the book address issues surrounding the victims of domestic violence: their rights and duties when it comes to prosecution and the measures that might be directed against victims who are unwilling to co-operate.What Dempsey calls her “central analytic tool” in ..

This brief article is concerned with an aspect of Jonathan Glover's book, Alien Landscapes?. After reflecting a little on the book as a whole, the question that is taken up is, ‘Why might a book that seeks to help those without mental disorders understand what they are like “from the inside” be of interest to laymen and practitioners in the criminal law?’. One answer lies in part in the way that ‘what it is like from the inside’ might interact with judgements of criminal responsibility. Taking its cue from examples used by Glover the article considers, and puts pressure on, the ‘dual view’ he proposes: that when dealing with those with mental disorders we should treat them as responsible agents in the sense of not withholding from them Strawson's ‘reactive attitudes’, while nevertheless accepting that their personalities and behaviours are the results of large doses of ‘bad luck’.

This paper is concerned with how we ought to think about legitimate expectations in the non-ideal, ‘real’ world. In one (dominant) strand of contemporary theories of justice, justice requires not that each gets what she deserves, but that each gets that to which she is entitled in accordance with what Rawls calls ‘the public rules that specify the scheme of cooperation’. However, that is true only if those public rules are part of a fully just scheme and it is plausibly the case that no such scheme obtains in the real world. Given that, and given the centrality of legitimate expectations to theories of justice, it is vital to think about the status of such expectations in non-ideal circumstances. Having explained the sense in which legitimate expectations have come to play a role often previously associated with desert, a brief argument in favour of an ‘expectations’ view of punishment is considered to show that the system to public rules that generates expectations must itself be (in some sense) just. This argument is illustrated by appeal to just punishment and the relevance of thinking about punishment and not merely distributive justice is defended. In the absence of justice, one possibility would be simply to declare that there are no legitimate expectations and so theories of justice provide no guidance as to who should get what in non-ideal conditions. However, this would be to render such theories more-or-less useless in practice. Through discussion of a series of vignettes, the paper offers an account of how we might think about the demands such expectations place on the systems that give rise to them even in cases where the system is unjust.

"Contexts of Justice is a study that covers and definitely exhausts the whole range of ten years of one of the most important recent philosophical discussions, that between liberals and communitarians."--Jurgen Habermas, author of Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere "Forst addresses with great insight and acuity the debates over justice between liberals and communitarians that animated the late '80s and '90s...He uses no jargon, he reasons well, his arguments are strong, clear, and accesssible, and he avoids political correctness as well as its opposite."--Andrew Arato, author of Civil Society, Constitution, and Legitimacy.

This book brings together moral and legal philosophers,criminologists and political theorists in an attempt to address the interdependence of the study of punishment and of political theory as well as specific issues, such as freedom, autonomy, coercion and rights that arise in both. In addition to new essays on the compatibility of rights and utilitarianism and of autonomy and coercion in Kant's theory, the book contains an extended treatment of the idea of punishment as communication. This theme is taken up in arguments over whether punishment is communicative, in the questions of what the content of any such communication could be in a pluralist society, and whether communicative accounts can make sense of the use of 'hard treatment'. By combining the techniques and expertise of different disciplines, the essays in this book shed new light on the problem of punishment. They also demonstrate the usefulness of that problem as a testing ground for legal and moral philosophy.

The chapter concerns the relationship between the justification of criminal law and punishment and the justification of the state. It briefly surveys the debate between retributivists and consequentialists and argues that both are inappropriate when it comes to state punishment. It next turns to arguments by Vincent Chiao, Malcolm Thorburn, and Antony Duff that locate criminal law and punishment in public law. The final parts of the chapter develop an account of criminal law and punishment as best understood as constitutive elements of a liberal political community necessary to ensure stability, to reinforce the commitment of the members to the rules as regulative of their plans of life, and to communicate and censure the offender for the wrong that has been done.